Thanks a million. It means a lot to know which game that was. I was going to hang a little picture by my computer now. My dad's name was John Damiano and I'm sure he was active on this forum if it was around before he died in 2010. Possible usernames, JDAM, porchdogsix.

I think my mom sold all of his computers along with his military radios so I'm going to have to buy my own.

Hi everyone,I've been occasionally checking this forum for quite a while and finally decided that having an account here is a good idea) I study Computer Science, love all sorts of video games and rock music) That's a typical nerdy description, I know)

hi to all atari lovers and a very happy atari new yeari am new in this forum and would like to introduce myself. i am australian and have a beautifull family ,2 girls ,a wife and a pet (fish) .right now we are enjoying a hot summer but great for holiday at the beach.thanks

I'm new in Atari world. Actually I have used Amiga computers over 20 years. I have had several Ataris in the past. Mega1 and STF1040, but I did not really used those. So few years ago I gave them away.

Last summer I get 520STFM for free. It has been lying unused until few weeks ago I managed to get Falcon030. I started suck information about Atari machines and realized possibilities of the 520STFM. Like build 2.5 or even 4 megabytes extra memory. I also ordered Ultrasatan to 520STFM. I did this because I bought machine I dreamed when I was young, Falcon030.

My hobby is fixing and programming retro machines. Job what I do is Linux application developer.

I'm trying to find some time to develop something also to Atari 16/32 bit machines. I hope it will be something useful.

My name is Alexandre and I came here looking for knowledge. I have some atari computers (400, 600XL, 800XL) and now I got a 1040STf. I never ever saw something like it in person. I'm very sad information is so mixed (I spent 3 days looking for the layout of that memory expansion board that sits on the shifter...so I had to design mine) but I hope I can contribute to a better Atari world for beginners like me.

I might aswell introduce myself even though I have already made a thread about my Mega ST2

I'm a guy from Sweden who loves retro computers and gaming consoles. When it comes to retro computers I have quite a few Amigas and C64:s and know these systems very well, but Atari is something completely new to me, so I will be looking forward to exploring what the Atari has to offer.

I have done a few games for different machines, and I might aswell posts some links here to advertise them a little Spike C64 Dislike - Spike C64 Dislike, a sort of port/clone of a iOS game (Spike Dislike) to the C64.Driar - A NES platformer made by me and a friend.Kim Pong Il - A simple Pong game for the Amiga by me and a friend, as an exercise to learn some 68000 assembler.Picross - A picross game for the Amiga, written in AMOS.

Who knows, maybe there will be an Atari game from me in the future?

Anyway, I will enjoy hanging around here to see what the Atari community is up to!

I'm originally from England, now live in Canada. I spent some happy years on the ST playing games and DTPing schoolwork with my brother who sadly passed away recently. Here's how our setup looked in 1989 soon after buying the 520STFM:

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I've always kept in touch with the ST via emulators; my brother gave me the Little Green Desktop CD for Christmas one year. I recently started tinkering with one of these freakish Chinese Famicom clones styled to look like a '486' keyboard (to sneak it into the homes under the guide of being 'educational', much as we did in the 80s with our 8 bit micros), and it made me think about how much I used to enjoy that old hardware.

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A few years ago my brother rescued a few of our old ST data disks (that had survived being banished to the loft) and transferred what he could to the PC. Most of what we did was lost forever but there were a few disks of music, sprites for games that we were always planning, and schoolwork that survived. I found some sprites that he (being the arty one) had made for a game that I was trying to code in 68K. We never got very far back then but I recently started to work towards finishing some of the projects that we had started over 20 years ago. While looking up 68K opcodes and XBIOs calls I discovered the amazing community that had grown around these machines, as well as magical devices that we could never have imagined such as huge CF hard drive replacements. Somehow I knew that emulators weren't going to be enough any more, and I had to acquire some real hardware.

I've just bought a Mega STE (one of my dream machines back in the day) and am going to keep my eye open for a Falcon and/or TT at the right price (which I didn't even dare to dream about). One sort of related thing I did a few years ago was hack a 3rd party Xbox 360 controller to let me plug in a Competition Pro joystick for Sensible Soccer, much to my brother's amusement:

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I was at it again a couple of years ago when I did the same trick to one of those iCade mini cabinets for the iPad, which I got to do justice to some of Jeff Minters recent iOS games. The rotary switch allows you to choose which arcade button is mapped to the Competition Pro's fire button, I keep meaning to make a video of this in action:

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Name's Thanos (from Athanasios, which in Ancient Greek means Undead). I'm from Greece. An old fan of Atari since 4-years-old. I started collecting the retro consoles (Sega Saturn, Sega Master System, etc), and I'm in need to collect the rest of the retro consoles, including all of Atari's.

I'm a music producer and a graphic designer. I'm also an author (I mostly write survival horror and psychological thriller novels) and a kendo athlete (2nd Dan).

Hadn't been for Atari, I'd be in a boring life trying to find a stable job and wouldn't meet the enjoyment of playing the videogames. That's why I want to thank Atari that taught me the Gamer's Way. For me, Atari is one of the 4 legendary companies (Atari, Apogee, 3D Realms and Sierra).

tat wrote:Hello, I'm Tat.I did a few ST and Falcon demos a long time ago. These days I make the GPU debugging tools for PlayStation 4.Steve

Oh, "a few demos" doesn't tell the whole truth. It wasn't just "any" demos. Sonolumineszenz blew me away when it was released and I still consider it to be one of the best demos released for the Falcon!

have been lurking around for a while. Really great to see so much Atari activity around here. I'm Jan (or nemo - as you like) and a while back did a bit of writing for websites and mags and also toyed around with SSD, maxymiser and ACE - still do in case of ACE. I'm currently playing catch up with some recent releases and getting in the good old Atari mood again.

my name is Jordi, aka crashman.I'm from a little town near Barcelona, Spain.I`m the proud owner of a 520STFM and a Falcon030 for a lot of years now.On the ST i was more on gaming, and later on the Falcon I rediscovered my fun in coding, to the point I released one utility for ripping music, pics on the falcon.you still can download it from somewhere, look for Mod Ripper.This year I went to a retro expo here in Barcelona, Retrobarcelona. To my surprise, no even a single ST was showed, but a whole lot of Amiga's... I still have my feelings for my computers, so I thought this is notgonna happen again!So , in 2015, the 30th anniversary of the Atari ST, I`ve started my own collection of St, just to show... the world? well, perhaps a little to bit of dreaming... just the visitors of the next year expo, and I will be very happy.Now, I'm the proud owner of a Mega ST 1, a 520ST and a 520ST+, and with more on the way...

If you want to share some ideas to what could be my expo stand, I'm all ears.

Thanks for reading, for accepting me here, and Happy New Year to everyone!!!

I was one of the two guys who ran the PD library LAPD for a few years in the 90s. A quick scan of this forum shows that plenty of our customers frequent these pages. Interesting to see the clamour for copies of the original disks, do you remember when we stopped trading? We said that whoever offered the most would get all our disks and equipment, that was about (IIRC) 5000 master disks (two copies of each so 10000 disks) 2 x STFMs 2 x STEs 2 x Falcons, assorted external drives, couple of dozen posso boxes, not sure if people believed the offer, the kit went to the highest offer received which was something ridiculous like £50, we were always true to our word so away the kit went. We didn't keep anything so cannot now help at all with any quest for files.

It was an interesting time whilst the library was operating, started really slowly and eventually was very highly rated by our customers (we tried hard to please), hard work for us both, we both had full time jobs with shift work yet still got all orders out the day they came in, we met and corresponded with some very nice people during this time, have to say at least one idiot who was convinced he could program games, had to return all he submitted.

This was supposed to be a quick Hi just to let you know that me (Leigh) and (Clive) are still around, just not around Ataris any more.

I develop a free Word (for Windows) add-in that's available for Word 2007 upwards. It's a fix-it toolbox that will allow power Word users to fix document errors. You can find it at: http://www.mikestoolbox.co.uk

I was one of the two guys who ran the PD library LAPD for a few years in the 90s. A quick scan of this forum shows that plenty of our customers frequent these pages. Interesting to see the clamour for copies of the original disks, do you remember when we stopped trading? We said that whoever offered the most would get all our disks and equipment, that was about (IIRC) 5000 master disks (two copies of each so 10000 disks) 2 x STFMs 2 x STEs 2 x Falcons, assorted external drives, couple of dozen posso boxes, not sure if people believed the offer, the kit went to the highest offer received which was something ridiculous like £50, we were always true to our word so away the kit went. We didn't keep anything so cannot now help at all with any quest for files.

It was an interesting time whilst the library was operating, started really slowly and eventually was very highly rated by our customers (we tried hard to please), hard work for us both, we both had full time jobs with shift work yet still got all orders out the day they came in, we met and corresponded with some very nice people during this time, have to say at least one idiot who was convinced he could program games, had to return all he submitted.

This was supposed to be a quick Hi just to let you know that me (Leigh) and (Clive) are still around, just not around Ataris any more.

Nice to see you guys here. Was just saying the other day, the chap where the collection went to never seemed to do anything with them I tried emailing him over the years but he was wanting to continue the PDL, which is fair enough. But whos going to pay for PD these days anyway ? I offered to buy them from him to image them but no go there either. nice to know how much he actually paid for it though. Wish I had known all the stuff was for sale at the time, though was probably assuming it would have sold for a lot more.

exxos wrote:Nice to see you guys here. Was just saying the other day, the chap where the collection went to never seemed to do anything with them I tried emailing him over the years but he was wanting to continue the PDL, which is fair enough. But whos going to pay for PD these days anyway ? I offered to buy them from him to image them but no go there either. nice to know how much he actually paid for it though. Wish I had known all the stuff was for sale at the time, though was probably assuming it would have sold for a lot more.

I think a few folks may have made the same assumption! The one guy who made a silly offer got a cracking deal. I didn't follow what happened to him or the disks after that but have since read that any hopes of making the disks more widely available came to nothing. Shame.

I did read on this forum a post by one guy who was not too happy with us, said we sent a solicitors letter... Nope, we never did, we may have sent a letter from ourselves but never used a solicitor. Cannot remember the incident he refers to but if he was using or profiting from something that we sold as licenceware then we would have taken reasonable steps to protect the income for the author, surely that makes sense, our conduct led to demise of the system? Ripping off others work and purporting it as your own would have have more effect. Still, he is much older now and hopefully takes a more mature view.

My name is Colin. I live in the SE of England. I found this forum after seeing a YouTube video about repairing an ST which sparked a desire to repair my old 520 STFM, so I Googled for an Atari forum and found this one.

A few details about my Atari history:

Started aged 15 with a 400 to which I added a proper keyboard and extra memory. Upgraded at 17 to an 800 to which I added extra memory and a memory monitor card.I then skipped the XL/XE series (save for buying the 1050 drive unit for my 800) and aged 21, bought a 520 STFM which is what brought me here. It has the extra 512K added and also an added circuit to control a 1.44Mb floppy.My work introduced me to PC's which led me to putting my Atari in storage. I'm now 51, a computer maintenance technician, with time on his hands and need for a new project. Hence the ST.

When my ST went into storage, I was sure it was working. However, it would appear my nephew has at some point cannibalised it for parts for his own ST (which he no longer has). So it now has a failed PSU, no FDD, the 1.44Mb drive circuit has no connecting wires, the keyboard has a broken key and I have no cables save for power which isn't the original one and no mouse.

The ST system board has the code C070523-001 REV D. and has TOS UK 1.41 ROMs (6 of them). The mysterious added FDD circuit (I cannot remember what it was called and no longer have any of my old Atari disks that might have given me a clue), has 1 16Mhz crystal, 1 GAL16V-25LNC chip and 3 other passive components along with 3w and 10w connectors. I did find evidence on the Yamaha chip solder pads where something had been attached to a few of them. Also the board has been Glued to the system board so is now a permanent feature. The only clue I do have is it was fitted by a shop called "The Atari Workshop" which used to be in Dulwich South London.

I have removed the PSU and have rigged up an old PC PSU to supply some power. I have removed the FDD cable from the system board (it was pretty messed up so this seemed the best thing to do before powering it up) I will add a 34w box header at a later date. I had some confusion over what kind of signal was coming from the TV port. The connector (as I know you guys know) is an RCA type that I could not fit a standard aerial cable to (it was too loose). There is no channel switch which led me to think it was a composite video port but it does did not produce a composite output to my TV. So after making my aerial cable fit better, I finally got an RF signal on Channel 36 (UK) after struggling to remember how to show the analogue stations on my digital TV.

To see the green background and drive icons displayed with the mouse pointer (sadly immobile not having a mouse to wiggle) was a joy. and has furthered my desire to make the ST fully functional again.

If you got this far, thanks for staying with me. To all, expect a few questions in the various thread sections.

CheersColin

Cheers

Colin

"Anyone wanting to be a Politian, should automatically be excluded from being one!"

Welcome to the Forum - sounds like you resurrected that old STFM. The board with the 16Mhz crystal on it will likely be a 1.44MB Floppy mod. You can safely remove it to get back to the stock DSDD floppy setup while you check everything else is working. You may also want to look at making (or buying) a SCART RGB or Composite cable for a better display. You can grab a composite signal from pin 2 and audio out on pin 1 of the monitor out socket if you want a quick n dirty solution